Elena was grieving.
It wasn’t as if the Celestial Court hadn’t done all that it had promised. Fell’s Church was restored. There wasn’t a possessed girl or a malach in sight. Houses which had been burned to the ground by children acting under evil influences were whole again—and nobody remembered a damned thing about the holocaust which had swept through the town.
On top of which, Elena had been given a second chance to live her life as an ordinary human. She ought to have been ecstatic over that.
But she couldn’t do more than summon up a quivering, watery smile.
Damon was dead. He was gone; his soul diffused into nothingness. Vampires didn’t go to the Dark Dimension when they died. They certainly didn’t go to the Celestial Court. They just . . . went out.
She would never see him again.
The first thing she did on the day she woke up and realized all this was to call Bonnie’s mobile. When no one answered she called Bonnie’s mother, who told her that Bonnie was home, but sick in bed.
Elena knew what kind of sickness it was. It was grief and guilt and fear. Bonnie held herself responsible for what had happened to Damon.
“Just give her the phone for one moment,” she said. And when Bonnie was listening, she said quickly, “I’m going to Mrs. Flowers’s house. I want to know what Mama and Grandmama have to say about Damon’s soul.”
Bonnie said in a whisper that was hoarse and choked with repressed emotion, “Take me, too! Please?”
When Elena picked her up, Bonnie’s small face was piteous, marred with hours of weeping in the night. Elena blinked back her own tears as she drove to Mrs. Flowers’ house. Together, they had raised their hands to knock at the door, and together they had started as the door opened before they could touch it.
“Mrs. Flowers,” Elena began, only to be met by a quick and cheerful voice saying,
“Tea? It’s peppermint and lemongrass. Good for enhancing psychic abilities. And I imagine we’ll need plenty of those today.”
“Mrs. Flowers, we’ve come—”
“Yes, yes. I know. What else could it be? Bonnie, I’ve got a cold rosewater compress for your eyes. Just hold it on while you drink your tea.”
The tea cleared Elena’s sinuses and her brain both. “Isn’t Stefan up yet?” she asked, feeling a little ripple of alarm. Normally, Stefan would have come downstairs at the sound of her car approaching the house, even if he couldn’t make out her aura from a distance any longer.
“Up and gone before dawn,” Mrs. Flowers said succinctly. “He went to—well, what used to be the Old Wood.”
“Hunting?”
“I wasn’t able to ask him, dear. I wouldn’t fret over it, though. Sometimes young male creatures just have to be out on their own. When they’ve experienced a loss . . .” Mrs. Flowers let the sentence trail off discreetly.
Elena drank the last of her tea, her mind whirling. She was trying to figure out what it would take for Stefan to stay in the Old Wood after hunting, knowing all the time that she and Bonnie would be devastated with grief today.
Devastated . . . but not prostrated.
Stefan wasn’t stupid. He’d know what Elena would do today. This morning. As soon as she woke up. And he probably knew that she’d bring Bonnie with her.
He was giving her space; grieving alone so that she could speak to Mrs. Flowers without embarrassment.
“So . . . why have we come this morning?” she asked the white-haired woman carefully.
“To find out what I’ve been trying to find out since late last night. Whethe
r a certain poor vampire’s soul is drifting through the æther, or reincarnated, or if it has . . . simply disappeared.”
Elena’s heart sank. “None of those possibilities sound like very good ones.”
“Well, we shall see, we shall see. I’ve already spoken to dear Mama about this and she said, ‘Let the young witch try her hand at dowsing with a crystal pendulum.’”
Bonnie took the rosewater compress off her face. Her eyes were much less swollen, Elena noted. “I thought dowsing was something you did with a stick to find water,” she said, still almost whispering.
“It can be—though most people are fooling themselves with that stick. It twists when tiny muscular movements tell it to. However, there is another kind of dowsing. You use a quartz crystal over a map . . . and this can be quite effective, whether you are looking for a lost object or for your heart’s desire.”